“We’ve had a relatively smooth day but it’s the poll watchers that are causing problems,” Trujillo said. “They are interfering with election officials’ duties.”

Police were called to remove disruptive GOP poll challengers from two voting precincts in Doña Ana County.

But the problem is more widespread than that, Trujillo said.

“We’ve had issues with watchers in four counties — Doña Ana, Taos, Santa Fe and Bernalillo County today,” Trujillo said. “Mostly it’s been issues with watchers superseding their duties.”

Challengers have attempted to handle voters’ ballots, Trujillo said, but he knew of no cases outside Doña Ana County where challengers demanded voters be required to provide photo ID to vote.

The incidents have been handled by county clerks and election officials at the precincts, Trujilo said. He did not immediately know how many precincts had reported disruptive poll challengers.

Trujillo said he knew of no police responses to precinct disruptions other than those reported for two Doña Ana County precincts.

The N.M. Republican Party has trained at least 350 poll challengers, at least 80 of whom are Albuquerque tea party activists. The state Democratic Party has trained at least 200 of its own poll challengers.

Poll watchers observe the voting process and check which voters have voted, whereas poll challengers can actively challenge voters’ registrations and ballots.

“Most of the problems we’re hearing about today involve Republican poll challengers,” Trujillo said.

However, in Taos County, Democratic and Republican poll challengers have been “equally aggressive,” Taos County Clerk Elaine Montano told The Independent.

Disruptions have occurred at four Taos precincts, Montano said at 6 p.m. Tuesday.

“I don’t know if it has something to do with their training or what the issue is,” Montano said. “They’re very aggressive. The challengers do not understand the rules. It’s being handled by poll workers and presiding judges, and myself.”

Challengers are advising voters who show up at the wrong precincts to request provisional ballots rather than drive to their correct precincts, Montano said. But challengers are not supposed to advise or talk to voters at the polls, Montano said.

None of the incidents in Taos County involved challengers’ demands for voters’ identification documents, Montano said.

The Secretary of State’s office has 15 liaisons at polling places across the state, Trujillo said.

The Secretary of State’s office will compile a report by late this week, detailing their reports of precinct disruptions, Trujillo said.

“Legal immigrants are active members of the community and shouldn’t be denied a voice because of these major barriers,” said Reva Eiferman, an organizer with Maine People’s Alliance. “There’s a disconnect between the citizenship process within the immigration system and an individual’s right to have their voice heard in their city.”

As cities and states across the country consider legislation aimed at limiting the flow of outsiders to their areas, a few municipalities are moving in the opposite direction, pushing to expand the rights of immigrants living within their borders. In Portland, Question 4 would allow legal immigrants to vote in municipal elections. A ballot proposition in San Francisco aims to take voting one step further, allowing even illegal immigrants to vote in school elections as long as they are the parents of a public school student. In New York, city council members plan to introduce legislation allowing legal residents to vote in city elections within the next few months.

These efforts show that while anti-immigrant sentiment is prevalent, it’s not universal, supporters argue.

“It responds to what’s happening nationwide — the new policies in Arizona included — in a positive way,” Eiferman said.

Non-citizens can already vote in six Maryland municipalities and in Chicago school elections, but the rest of the country gives voting privileges only to citizens. Early in the country’s history, non-citizens were allowed to vote in most states, but as immigration into the United States increased, residents began to restrict voting rights, state by state. (Federal elections have always limited voting to citizens.) By the 1920s, as Europeans moved to the country after World War I, states cut off legal immigrant voting rights entirely, and only a few cities have so far reinstated them.

“It was kind of like the atmosphere now: There was concern about the volume of newcomers and what it means for the nature of America and where it’s headed,” said Ron Hayduk, a political science professor at the City University in New York and a supporter of expanding New York voting rights to non-citizens.

If immigrants can vote, they will never bother to become citizens, said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the anti-illegal immigration group Center for Immigration Studies. He said the citizenship process is sufficiently easy for legal immigrants that they should be required to fully commit to the country before getting the right to vote.

“It’s silly not to require that formal step of marrying America instead of just shacking up,” Krikorian said.

But supporters argue that voting would help legal immigrants become more invested in their cities and schools. The San Francisco ballot measure to give parents of public school students the right to vote, Proposition D, could dramatically increase the number of potential voters in school elections: About half of all children in the Bay area have at least one immigrant parent,according to a study by the California Immigration Policy Center.

“I really believe our schools will be better if more parents are involved in every level of school governance,” said Kathy Coll, the mother of two San Francisco Unified School District students and one of three co-chairmen of the campaign for Proposition D.

In New York, the effort to expand voting will go through the city council, not through voters directly. City council member Daniel Dromm, a Democrat, said the council plans to consider legislation to extend voting in city elections to legal immigrants with the next few months. The bill will be called the Resident Voting Rights Act — “They are residents, they’re just not citizens yet,” Dromm said — and would allow any legal resident to vote in municipal elections.

“I feel it’s a basic right: This country was founded on the premise of ‘no taxation without representation,’” Dromm said. “By denying residents the right to vote, we are forcing taxation without representation.”

“AES has provided, as a courtesy, storage and distribution services to the previous as well as the current secretary of state for the office’s inventory of ballot tabulators and voter assist devices,” Flores said Monday in an email to The Independent. “AES has kept this equipment in its secure, climate controlled facilities located in Rio Rancho.”

That confirms former elections chief A.J. Salazar’s contention that no contract exists for the machines’ storage. Less clear is whether or not there is any basis for Salazar’s concerns about the security or integrity of the voting equipment, The Independent found Monday.

Salazar raised concerns about the lack of a contract for the storage of voting machines at the private facility during a March 12 interview with The Independent. Salazar said there was no designated chain of custody for the machines, creating a potential for abuse.

“My concern was for chain of custody and the security and integrity of those machines,” Salazar told The Independent.

But chain-of-custody paperwork and regular inventories are kept for those machines and shared with the secretary of state’s office—and it is unclear how their integrity could be compromised, AES President Terry A. Rainey told The Independent Monday.

Access to the machines is strictly controlled and logged, Rainey claimed.

“We have video and audio surveillance,” Rainey said. “Our (computer) system monitors all visits to the building. We give regular inventory reports to the Secretary of State. Every piece of voting equipment is, by statute, tested and certified prior to use.”

At question are M100 Ballot Tabulators, optical scan devices that automatically tally paper ballots, and AutoMark Voter Assist Terminals, Braille-equipped touch-screen voting terminals that generate paper ballots.

“The only M100s we have here are county machines here for repair or (machines that are) part of the secretary of state’s ‘pool,’” Rainey said. “The previous secretary of state administration and this administration asked us to secure them for them because we have secure facilities. The (M100) has no software in the machines at all and is required by statute to be self-contained and stand-alone, with no external connections.”

Video cameras are visible around the exterior of the AES warehouse, and an employee at the warehouse confirmed that “mag cards,” punch codes and computer logs of who has accessed the warehouse, all serve to restrict access to the voting machines.

Of the 43 state-owned machines currently stored at AES, “six or seven” are Voter Assist Terminals, Flores said Tuesday. Another 33 machines—one for each of the state’s counties—were distributed to county clerks’ offices in 2008, Rainey said.

In addition to a competitive bid award to print ballots for state and local elections, which expires later this year, AES has a no-bid maintenance contract to clean, adjust and test voting equipment for the state, Rainey said. AES is the only New Mexico company certified to service these machines, according to sole-source (no-bid) procurement applications submitted to the state General Services Department by the secretary of state’s office.

The Independent has filed public records requests for AES’s contracts, voting machine chain-of-custody and inventory records, and the state’s payments to AES.

Photo by Theresa Thompson/Flickr

Legislation that would allow a person to register to vote then immediately cast a ballot at early voting sites is scheduled in final committees in both the House and Senate this week. Proponents say it would increase access to elections at the same time it improves the accuracy, transparency, and efficiency of how voter registration files are maintained. Detractors voice concern that without an official government issued photo ID, the possibility of voter fraud will increase.

In order to both register and vote at early voting sites, the bills would require a person to present a physical ID, which could be either a government issued ID or a current copy of common documents that prove residency, such as utility bills, bank statements, or other forms of government documents.

The bills also require that the registration be entered into the state online voter database on the spot so that county clerks can verify the person isn’t registered and voting elsewhere in the same election. If the online database isn’t operational, the voter would be given a provisional ballot instead of a regular ballot. The bill would also allow currently registered voters to update their registration information. Neither bill allows same day voter registration on Election Day itself.

The legislation has been endorsed by New Mexico Secretary of State Mary Herrera, who voiced support for the Senate version when it was heard in the Senate Rules committee earlier this week, as well as the New Mexico County Clerks Affiliate, which represents all county clerks in the state.

Allowing same-day registration and voting during the early voting period would increase the accuracy of the statewide voter file and save the state “an enormous amount of money” by reducing the waste of sending election related mail to the wrong address, said Lea County Clerk Pat Chappelle and  Bernalillo County Clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver in a late January Albuquerque Journal opinion piece. Plus, the duo said, it would provide a good alternative to third-party registration drives that often produce inaccurate information.

“This bill allows voters to register directly with a representative of a county clerk, making for a simpler, more transparent registration process, and we believe it will lessen the desire for third-party groups to register voters themselves,” the two stated in the piece. “As county clerks, we are committed to uncomplicated, accessible voter registration and election processes.”

The two clerks explicitly identified themselves as a bi-partisan pair.

“This is not a partisan issue. One of us is an elected Republican, the other is an elected Democrat,” they said.

The bill would also eliminate a barrier often experienced by would be first time voters, said Steve Allen, Executive Director of the good government group Common Cause, in an email to The Independent.

“Right now in New Mexico, you have to register at least 28 days before an election if you want to vote,” Allen told The Independent. “Many people dipping into politics for the first time don’t start getting excited about an election until a couple weeks before Election Day, when the media starts really covering races. This is especially true of state and local races.”

“So young people and others often end up finding out they won’t be able to vote because of this unreasonable deadline. Early voting registration strengthens our democracy by opening up the process to more qualified citizens,” Allen said.

Some have expressed concern, however, that not requiring a government issued ID that includes a photograph will lead to voter fraud. During the Senate Rules committee on Monday, Sen. Dianna Duran, R-Tularosa, introduced an amendment to the bill that would have required a government-issued photo ID, arguing that it would help prevent voter fraud. Her amendment ultimately failed.

Duran’s comments were countered by representatives of the All Indian Pueblo Council and the Native American Voters Alliance, who argued that many Native Americans don’t have government issued photo ID’s. Many tribal governments don’t issue photo ID’s, they said. Nor do all Native Americans have state issued driver’s licenses.

The bill would also help greatly in reducing barriers that exist among tribal populations currently for increasing the voting population, they continued. Those barriers include lack of transportation in rural areas and work obligations that make taking a day off to vote a difficult undertaking for many.

On the Senate side, Sen. John Sapien’s SB 161 is on the agenda for the Senate Judiciary committee Wednesday afternoon. Rep. Jim Trujillo’s HB 123 has been passed on to the House Voter’s and Election committee Thursday morning.

“It’s easy for people to say, ‘How could somebody believe that?’ but the truth is, with the heavy turnout we’re seeing, it sounds like a reasonable solution to at least some people and you have people who really aren’t sure when Election Day is,” Bundy said.

Folks who got the calls said they came in the middle of the night and were from real people — not recordings.

Bundy could not say who made the calls. He did say that Working America is going through the paperwork turned in by canvassers to try and find the people who got the calls and make sure they know to vote today.

The polls in New Mexico close at 7 p.m. You must be in line by 7 p.m. to vote.

If you requested an absentee ballot but have not yet received it, go to your correct polling location now and fill out an affidavit saying that you requested but never received the absentee ballot, advises Election Protection. You will then complete what the Election Code calls an “emergency paper ballot.”

If you encounter any problems at the polls or have any questions about voting, contact the Election Protection hotline in English (866-OUR-VOTE, which is 866-687-8683) and in Spanish (888-VE-Y-VOTA, which is 888-839-8682).

New Mexico voting rights advocates reported this morning that there have been few problems reported so far on this Election Day.

“We’ve caught a few problems this morning, including one at Grants Middle School, …[where] a caller reported that poll workers were requesting physical ID from every voter at that polling place, which is contrary to New Mexico law,” Steve Allen, executive director of Common Cause of New Mexico said.

Common Cause and other groups, including the New Mexico Federation of Labor, are part of a nationwide voting rights coalition called Election Protection.

In New Mexico, only first-time voters who registered by mail are required to show identification at the polls. Allen said volunteers had been sent out to investigate the problem at Grants Middle School and that he thought it would be resolved quickly.

“I believe it’s going fairly well,” said Carter Bundy of the labor federation. “There are no systemic problems.”

Also today, the McCain/Palin campaign held a conference call with reporters on the subject of vote fraud. Introducing the call, spokesman Brian Jones said, “We have seen some troubling instances of voting irregularities. We’ve seen instances of voter fraud, we’ve seen instances of voter intimidation.” But none of the speakers on the call said anything about voter fraud. I queued to ask the speakers about it, but they only took a handful of questions before ending the call.

After a rundown of some specific problems in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and Virginia, McCain-Palin spokesman Ed O’Callaghan said he did not see any systemic or organized problems. New Mexico was not mentioned during the call.

And we have a report from the Independent’s Joel Gay, who voted this morning in Albuquerque’s North Valley: “I went over at noon, which should have been as busy as it gets, but it was 25 empty booths and me,” Gay said. “One of the poll workers said they had a line when they opened the doors at 7 a.m., but it cleared out quickly. They chalked it up to early voting.”

New Mexico Secretary of State Mary Herrera’s office has instructed county clerks to allow folks like you to vote in person at early voting locations.

In a letter dated Oct. 29 to county clerks throughout the state, Bureau of Elections Director Gerald Gonzalez said the new instruction was meant to enfranchise voters:

We view the goal of the Election Code as being to enfranchise voters, and as such, conclude that a voter should be allowed to ask for a replacement absentee ballot during a flexible time period and at any authorized voting location.

Gonzalez told the Independent that people who are waiting for an absentee ballot can now go to any early voting site and request to vote early.

At the early voting site, they’ll have to sign an affidavit saying they have not received their absentee ballot and will then fill out an application for a new one. But instead of being issued a new one, they’ll be allowed to simply vote early, with their ballots run through the tabulator at the early voting site.

If a person who requested an absentee ballot but hasn’t received it decides to wait until Election Day, however, they will be given a provisional ballot.

Gonzalez told the Independent that provisional ballots go through a “different processing route. They’re hand tallied later that day, rather than being run through the tabulator.”

In a press release, the non-partisan coalition Election Protection said the new rule is needed because of the high number of absentee ballot requests this year:

Due to the incredibly high number of requests for vote-by-mail ballots, some clerks have been working around the clock to send out ballots, but either through that process or issues with mail, some voters still do not have their ballots.

Election Protection is composed of a diverse group of organizations, including Common Cause, the New Mexico Federation of Labor, and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights.

New Mexico Federation of Labor President Christine Trujillo said, “We want to ensure that every registered voter in New Mexico has the chance to vote this year. This instruction addresses an issue that has been a significant problem in a few pockets of the state.”

Election Protection has established a hotline in English (866-OUR-VOTE, which is 866-687-8683) and in Spanish (888-VE-Y-VOTA, which is 888-839-8682) for voters experiencing any problems voting, either at early sites, by mail or on Election Day. Voters regardless of party registration are encouraged to use this number if they have any questions about voting.